Eleanor Holmes Norton 1937–

Political allies and opponents alike agree that Eleanor Holmes Norton—Washington, D.C.’s delegate to Congress and ardent supporter of statehood for the District—is an extraordinarily accomplished and intelligent woman, skilled at political dealmaking. Relatively powerless as politicians go—the D.C. delegate has only limited voting powers in Congress—she nonetheless has made her presence known on a number of national issues since taking office in 1990. But her abilities in transforming a once-symbolic political seat into a meaningful pulpit for her causes should come as no surprise. Throughout her professional career, Norton has successfully taken on tough assignments with one clear goal emerging throughout her work: a steadfast insistence that government and society respect human rights.

A fourth generation Washingtonian, Norton was born on June 13, 1937. Her father was a government worker in the District’s bureaucracy and her mother taught school. She has said that an event she experienced while growing up in Washington helped shape her beliefs about human justice. In 1949, when she was 12 years old, Norton watched a protest outside of Hecht’s department store. Activist Mary Church Terrell was picketing the store because blacks were not allowed to use Hecht’s bathrooms, though they were allowed to buy clothes there. Norton held on to that memory of protest when she left Washington in 1955 to attend Antioch College in Ohio, from which she received her undergraduate degree. She then attended Yale University, where in 1963 she received a master’s degree in American Studies and in 1964 she earned her law degree.

Following an assignment in Philadelphia as clerk to federal court judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Norton was appointed the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). During the turbulent civil rights movement of the 1960s, she also worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In 1968 she won the first case she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court; in that proceeding, Norton—an unswerving advocate of free speech—argued on behalf of a white supremacist group that had been barred from holding a rally in Maryland. Also, as an ACLU lawyer, she once sued the mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, on behalf of the segregationist politician George Wallace, who was initially prevented from making a speech at Shea Stadium during his 1968

Selected awards: Honorary degrees from more than 50 colleges and universities; Young Woman of the Year Award, Junior Chamber of Commerce, 1965; Louise Waterman Wise Award, American Jewish Congress, 1971, among others.

At the time of her appointment, Norton was quoted in McCall’s magazine as saying, “As commissioner, I will attempt to see that no man is judged by the irrational criteria of race, religion, or national origin. And I assure you I use the word ’man’ in the generic sense, for I mean to see that the principle of nondiscrimination becomes a reality for women as well.”

She then began a remarkable string of achievements, tenaciously battling prejudice and injustice. Combating housing discrimination, intervening to reverse a state ruling that denied a polio victim a teaching certificate, and suing a real estate broker who would not rent to blacks were just a few of the actions Norton took in New York City. In doing so, she made enemies. Conservatives fretted about her activism, while some members of the black community criticized her for placing too much emphasis on women’s issues at the expense of combating racial prejudice. She was quoted in McCall’s as saying, “It’s a shame that this criticism exists … because black people and women are going to have to get together if we’re going to create some change in this country. I don’t for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have—women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same. This country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers-that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to the women who’ve worked all their lives for half wages or no pay.”

While in New York, Norton also taught a class at New York University Law School, hosted a television program called “Open Circuit,” and conducted a radio program.

After her impressive performance in New York, Norton was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to serve as chairperson of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a post she held for four years. Following her government service, she focused on teaching law and became a tenured professor at Georgetown University. She also served on a panel created by President Gerald Ford to look into America’s welfare system. Throughout her various career positions, she has been sought out by commentators soliciting opinions on various issues, from the war in Kuwait to the role of affirmative action in America. On affirmative action, she said in an interview with Essence in 1990: “Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination…. Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the Black middle class.”

During his 1988 bid for the presidency, Jesse Jackson named Norton his representative at the convention during debate over the Democratic party’s platform. The party “outsider,” Jackson was thought to have chosen Norton partly because she was so well respected among Democrats; soon Ebony was calling her a “national Democratic Party power broker.” When Walter Fauntroy, the man who had represented the District in Congress for 20 years, announced he would be stepping down in 1990 to run (unsuccessfully) for mayor, Norton shifted her focus from the wide-ranging arena of national politics to the bread and butter concerns of Washington.

Norton was quoted in Ebony as saying that Fauntroy’s decision was “a watershed moment in the history of the district,” adding that it was time for Washington “to seize the opportunity and declare a new start, to strike up a redefined relationship with Congress and the White House and form its top elected officials into a coordinated team.” But first she had to win the seat, a goal that seemed easily within reach until just before the Democratic primary in the fall of 1990.

In the days preceding the September primary, Norton was hit with a stunning setback. According to the Washington Post, reporters had received an anonymous leak that Norton and her husband had failed to pay District income taxes between 1982 and 1989. At a hastily called news conference, Norton tearfully explained that her husband, Edward, not she, was responsible for the family finances. The Nortons eventually paid $88,000 in back taxes and penalties.

“But many voters were skeptical of the explanation, and what had been expected to be a lopsided victory turned into a closer race,” the Washington Post reported. Norton won the primary with 40 percent of the vote, compared to 33 percent for the second place finisher. In November, she gathered 62 percent of the vote against Republican candidate Harry Singleton.

While her political career survived the tax scandal, her marriage did not. The couple legally separated just days after the 1990 election; the Washington Post quoted her friends as saying the Nortons’ split resulted directly from the tax controversy. The two were divorced in 1993. The Nortons have two children including a daughter, Katherine, who has Down’s syndrome. Norton was quoted in Ebony as saying of her daughter, “Katherine is an extraordinary human being and it’s a pleasure to bring out the best in her.”

Once in Congress Norton quickly began to distinguish herself from previous District representatives. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy noted admiringly that Norton had traveled out of the District only twice in the 18 months following her 1990 election. “By Februaiy [1992], according to a tally compiled by her staff, she had attended 500 community meetings. She averages two congressional hearings a day,” Milloy wrote. Commentators described her activities as “parochial,” but in the best sense of the word.

While weighing in on various national and international topics, Norton’s first term in Congress was marked primarily by a focus on local issues. The Christian Science Monitor pointed out that she was able to convince Congress to appropriate $100 million to the District to help Washington quickly avert a budget crisis. That was part of $300 million in new federal money she won for the District. “She took on the federal bureaucracy in neighborhood disputes, delivering a level of constituent service that was absent under her predecessor,” according to an article in the Washington Post.

Other issues addressed in her first term included pressuring the National Park Service—which administers a wide swath of territory in the federal city—to install lights in crime-ridden areas; advocacy of an international trade center in the District; support for a referendum that would make manufacturers of assault weapons liable for crimes committed with their products; and opposition to the death penalty.

In an October 1992 editorial in the Washington Post entitled “A Second Term for Mrs. Norton,” the paper opined, “She has been a spectacular representative of District interests in Congress.” A spectacular Democrat, the paper could have added. Throughout her first term, Norton was a frequent critic of then-President George Bush, becoming the first elected leader to urge Bush to do something positive in the wake of the rioting that erupted in Los Angeles after the Rodney King/police brutality verdict.

At the 1992 Democratic convention, Norton made a pitch for D.C. statehood, which President Bush opposed. The Washington Post quoted her as telling the convention, “Give us a president who is not afraid to support at home the democracy he demands abroad…. Give us full-service democracy, not lip-service paternalism.” Norton’s strong words derived from the fact that she holds the statehood issue at the top of her political agenda. “I am proud to be an American, proud to represent 600,000 Americans, and proud to be in the only party pledged to make the District of Columbia the 51st state,” she told the convention, according to the Post article. Norton was reelected in 1992 without opposition.

Before tackling the statehood issue, Congress gave Norton wider powers than any other District representative had ever had. Delegates such as herself, and those representing four U.S. territories, are constitutionally barred from becoming full members of the House. They can vote in committee, speak on the House floor, introduce legislation, and even head a committee through seniority. Until January of 1993, though, they were unable to vote on the House floor. But Norton devised a legal strategy—she is a Constitutional scholar, after all— that allowed Congress to grant her a House vote. Norton noted that the full House meets in what parliamentarians call a “committee of the whole.” Since delegates can vote in committee, she reasoned that the committee of the whole—which is how Congress gathers to debate and vote on substantive issues—is in fact yet another committee of Congress. Delegates are still barred from final congressional votes, but by the time legislation reaches that stage most legislation has already been reshaped and the issues decided.

Norton was quoted in the Washington Post as saying her new voting privileges were a “sign of respect” for the District. Controversy aside, Norton was pleased with the historic developments she initiated, telling the Washington Post, “As far as I’m concerned it’s added immeasurably to my ability to get things done in the House. This shows that the House has done everything for the District it can, short of granting statehood. And that means something.”

As for statehood, Norton and other District politicians have always complained that Congress micromanages the city’s affairs. Appropriations committees in Congress can overrule sections of the city’s budget and Congress has a significant influence in how the city operates. Washington’s mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, has accused Congress of adopting a “plantation mentality” in its dealings with the predominantly African American city. Norton, in an interview with Emerge, said, “In the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement telegraphed to the world that the United States was living a lie. We are in a comparable situation today… because the stance we have taken internationally in terms of urging democratic principles is directly contrary to the way we treat people in our own capital.”

In 1992 Norton’s statehood bill died in committee when it became apparent that President Bush would veto the measure no matter what Congress did. Her bill would create the state of New Columbia with the federal government controlling only the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court, as well as federal monuments and some other governmental buildings. Republicans oppose the measure since statehood would almost certainly guarantee that the heavily-Democratic District of Columbia would send two new Democrats to the Senate.

But Norton has vowed not to give up on the issue, and she regularly lobbies her colleagues in Congress whenever she can. To her, the statehood issue, which would guarantee Washingtonians a full voice in their future, is similar to the other issues of fair play that have motivated her from her earliest days watching civil rights protests outside the neighborhood department store. “You can’t whip folks into line on statehood like you can on a budget vote,” she told the Washington Post Magazine. “People have to believe in your cause.”And it’s clear that if anyone can turn around an opinion with a forceful, well-reasoned argument, that person is Eleanor Holmes Norton.

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Norton, Eleanor Holmes

West's Encyclopedia of American Law
COPYRIGHT 2005 The Gale Group, Inc.

NORTON, ELEANOR HOLMES

Eleanor Holmes Norton is a politician, lawyer, educator, and civil rights activist. As the District of Columbia's delegate to the U.S. Congress, she expanded the district's power over its own affairs.

Norton, the eldest of three daughters, was born to Coleman Holmes and Vela Holmes on June 13, 1937, in Washington, D.C. Her father was a government employee in the District of Columbia, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Norton grew up in the segregated Washington, D.C., of the 1940s and 1950s and was a member of the last segregated class at Dunbar High School. Norton attended Antioch College, where she participated in many civil rights protests, and she graduated from Yale Law School.

In 1965, Norton became an attorney with the american civil liberties union (ACLU), seeking to defend the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly. The clients she represented were not always those she had imagined. Among them were former Alabama governor george wallace, an avowed segregationist, who had been denied a permit to speak at New York City's Shea Stadium, and a group of white supremacists who had been barred from holding a rally. The white supremacists' suit eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Norton argued it and won (Carroll v. President of Princess Anne, 393 U.S. 175, 89 S. Ct. 347, 21 L. Ed. 2d 325 [1968]).

In 1970, Norton became head of the New York City Commission on Human Rights. In 1977, President jimmy carter appointed her to run the federal equal employment opportunity commission (EEOC), which was facing a backlog of nearly 100,000 unsettled affirmative action and discrimination complaints. At the EEOC, Norton initiated a system known as "rapid charge processing", which provided for informal settlement procedures. By late 1980, the backlog had dropped to 32,000 complaints. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) criticized the agency's emphasis on settling individual complaints rather than attacking broad patterns of discrimination. But Norton argued that only by wiping out the backlog could the EEOC get to these broader issues. By the time she left the agency, it was taking on more sweeping investigations, antidiscrimination guidelines for employers were in place, and the Carter administration was enforcing workplace laws such as the equal pay act of 1963 (29 U.S.C.A. 206) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (29 U.S.C.A. 621).

Following Carter's defeat in 1980, Norton moved on to the Urban Institute. In 1982, she joined the law faculty at Georgetown University Law Center, where she wrote widely on civil rights and education issues. In 1990, Norton was elected the nonvoting D.C. delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. During her first term, she helped the district government to obtain $300 million in new federal aid and a guarantee of steady increases in future aid. She secured seats on three House committees that greatly affect the district's economy, and she was the only freshman legislator to be invited on a congressional fact-finding mission to the Middle East following the Persian Gulf War.

Norton also sought to increase the power of the D.C. delegate position. The district's delegate to Congress is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution from becoming a full member of the House of Representatives, and had been allowed to vote only in legislative committees. Norton argued that because she could vote in other committees, she should also be allowed to vote in the committee of the whole, where most of the business of the full House is conducted. In February 1993, the House granted Norton and the representatives of four U.S. territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa—a limited vote in the committee of the whole. The voting limitations included a provision that any time the delegates provided a margin of victory for legislation, a second vote would be held, from which the delegates would be excluded. Despite these restrictions, House Republicans filed suit in federal district court, asking that the delegates' right to vote be taken away. In March 1993, U.S. district judge Harold Greene rejected the challenge (Michel v. Anderson, 817 F. Supp. 126 [D.D.C.]). The Republicans then appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which upheld the lower court (14 F. 3d 623 [D.C. Cir. 1994]). Norton and the four territorial representatives retained their

voting privileges until January 1995, when a new House took them away.

Norton's efforts on behalf of the District of Columbia extended outside the House of Representatives. Traditionally, the senior senator from each state, if a member of the president's party, recommends to the president candidates for federal judgeships and U.S. attorney positions. Because the district has no senators, the president alone has made these appointments for it.

In 1993, Norton convinced President bill clinton to give her the advisory powers reserved for senators and to allow her to nominate candidates for a U.S. attorney position and five federal judgeships, becoming the first district congressional delegate to do so. Norton established the Federal Judicial Nominating Commission, composed of members from the district, to forward recommendations to her. All five of the judges Norton ultimately recommended to the president had been active in D.C. legal circles, and four of them lived in the district.

Norton also continued her predecessors' efforts to obtain statehood for the district. After a three-year effort to bring the issue to the House floor, the measure failed by a vote of 277–153. But Norton said that she would continue her efforts and that she would put new emphasis on gaining support for legislation that would expand the district's limited home rule. Norton also worked for increased federal contributions to the city's pension system, for an end to congressional review of the city's budget, and for the right of D.C. residents to choose local judges.

In 2003, Norton was serving her seventh term as the Congresswoman for the District of Columbia. She was a member of subcommittees on the House Committee on Government Reform and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where she has a full vote. She has served as Democratic chair of the Women's Caucus and has served in the Democratic House leadership group. She continues to fight for civil rights and human rights and to advocate strongly for full congressional voting representation for District of Columbia citizens.

"On behalf of the taxpaying citizens I represent, I deeply regret the withdrawal of the vote I won on the House floor just two years ago."—Eleanor Norton

Norton has served on numerous boards including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Board of Governors of the D.C. Bar Association. She has received more than 50 honorary degrees.

further readings

"Eleanor Holmes Norton." House of Representatives Web-site. Available online at <www.norton.house.gov> (accessed April 21, 2003).

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Norton, Eleanor Holmes

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Eleanor Holmes Norton, 1937–, African-American lawyer and government official. As an attorney (1965–70) for the American Civil Liberties Union, she specialized in First Amendment cases. She later headed New York City's Human Rights Commission (1970–77) and the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (1977–83), and taught at Georgetown Univ. Since 1991 Norton has been the District of Columbia's elected, nonvoting delegate to the U.S. Congress.

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